I grew up playing Pokemon. It’s an incredible series. The games are brilliant in many ways. Let’s just assume I’m not hating on the series and move on. Pokemon has a simple problem: Catching Pokemon is largely pointless. Higher level pokemon gain absurd advantages over their less powerful counterparts. The game also provides better stat […]

I just read a great anecdote on Twitter that is a perfect example of usability design. It’s not the dog buddy, it’s the system. I’ll explain below. This is the best god damn story I have ever read. https://t.co/EJKCOtsEqL— Mia (@PastelPouts) October 20, 2016 In summary, an owner trains his dog to wait by the […]

A design exercise I often use is to try and create the *worst* possible version of a project. This helps shake up my thinking and reveal the core points of the experience, because I have to identify them in order to thwart them. I recently found out Katerina Kamprani tried the same thing with everyday items. […]

WOTC R&D: This is safe to read. There are no custom card designs in this article. Magic: the Gathering is in the midst of what seems to be a downward spiral for the game’s diversity and balance in its Standard Format. Players are complaining and the recent standard bannings, which haven’t had to happen in years, […]

I see a lot of questions about so-called design paradoxes, in which decisions are only interesting if they can be solved but once they are solved the game stops being interesting. I’ve found myself writing the same basic response so often I actually have it saved for easy copying and pasting. This is that post. […]

Two game genres commonly deal with players assembling a collection of units. One is familiar to any player of Magic: the Gathering, Hearthstone or any other card battler. The other is the miniature war game genre. Both games have a lot in common, as is made more evident by games like Summoner Wars and even […]

I often talk about the importance of elegance in design. However, the most straightforward individual designs can sometimes massively complicate the overall game. Nowhere has this been more apparent to me than in studying Yu-Gi-Oh’s cardpool. Many of their cards are forced into microtext sizes with an absurd number of added effects and qualifiers. It […]

I’m back home for vacation and playing a lot of tabletop games with my friends and family. While a  lot of my friends are deep-dive hardcore gamers, my family tends to look at a tabletop and think “coffee and conversation” rather than “dungeons and dragons”. Here’s the thing: My family often enjoys games of deep […]